Check up on the bees; I should have done this last week but was down with a cold, so a bit overdue. Mostly wanted to check on their progress in filling out the box; the bottom half had a lot of bees on the frames when I pulled them out to check, but only a bit of progress on covering them with comb, so I switched two of the filled out frames with emptier ones on the bottom to encourage building those out, as opposed to what they were doing, which was building more comb on top of the filled out frames:
Scraped off all of said comb and left it out for them to collect the nectar/honey from to bring back into the hive. Once they’re done with that I can go out and grab the comb for wax. This is one of the reasons to check on the hive, as letting them build wherever means they can construct so much cross comb you’ll never be able to pull out frames to harvest without destroying a ton of viable honey and brood containing comb.
One of the partially filled out frames; the queen seems to be doing a good enough job, even if the workers might be slacking a bit! I’m planning to supplement them with some syrup feeding to encourage more frame build out so I can get a second box set up on top soon. This one has has a lot of brood, both capped and looking like soon to be capped, with a tiny portion of capped honey cells in the top right. The tear-drop shaped bits seem to be queen cups, which they’ll always build a few have to be ready in case a new queen needs to get raised if something happens to the old one or they get unsatisfied with her performance.